Paul Rassinier

Paul Rassinier ( Bermont , March 18, 1906 – 1967 ), was a writer and political activist pacifist , communist militant , socialist and later anarchist . After World War II and based on his own experiences and the investigation of the experiences of others who lived in death camps where there was no extermination, he became a Revisionist Holocaust.

As a member and combatant of the French Resistance , he was a prisoner of the Nazi concentration camps in Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora . Journalist and editor, he wrote hundreds of articles on political and economic issues, but is mainly remembered for his views on the Holocaust .

Childhood and youth

Rassinier was born on March 18, 1906 in Bermont , in the Territoire de Belfort , in the heart of a politically active family. During World War I , Paul’s father, Joseph, a farmer and veteran of the French colonial army in Tonkin (present-day Vietnam ), entered a military prison for his pacifist attitudes , something his son Paul never forgot. 1

After the war, his family supported the socialist revolutions, and Rassinier joined the French Communist Party (PCF) in 1922 . He obtained a position as a professor at the “Ecole Valdoie , ” and in 1933 became professor of history and geography in the “College d’Enseignement Générale” of Belfort . 2

In 1927 , he served in the French Army in Morocco , where his pacifist convictions were reinforced by the brutal colonialist repression and military corruption he witnessed. Rassinier later described how “we got used to the shocking scenes of torture , that had nothing to envy to those of the Middle Ages , and saw the apparatus of dictatorship not retreating, but advancing against murder! 3 4 After Demobilization, returned to his teaching position and his political activism. It is also around this time that he became a member of the War Resisters’ International .

Pre-war political activities

Rassinier was promoted to the post of party secretary of the PCF in the department of Belfort . In 1932, Lucien Carre, secretary of the Belfort communist youths, was arrested in Tunisia for anti-militarism activities, and a leftist coalition composed of several organizations, including the French Section of the Workers’ International (SFIO), held protest rallies. Rassinier supported Henri Jacob’s effort to enlist middle-class parties in the mobilization, and for this and other acts ” … which betray the interests of the working class “, Jacob and Rassinier were expelled from the communist party in 1932 After his expulsion, Jacob, Rassinier and other expelled communists decided to form a separate party, the Independent Eastern Communist Federation. Formed in 1932, Rassinier was the secretary of the party, and Jacob the auxiliary secretary. Rassinier was also the editor of the party newspaper , El Trabajador . Neither the party nor the paper became popular, and both were dissolved in 1934. 5

The Riots of February 6, 1934 seemed to create new opportunities for the labor movement, and around this time Rassinier joined the SFIO. He became secretary of the SFIO Federation for the Territory of Belfort, and restored a dying newspaper, Germinal , to serve as an organ of the party. Adopting the ideology of Marceau Pivert , he was a prolific author 6 and denounced the arms race , called for the revision of the Treaty of Versailles , demanded more rights for workers and promoted a pacifist ideology that is not restricted to France, but wanted to reach Be pan-European .

As the clouds of war formed, Rassinier wrote articles condemning Nazism and fascism , whose foreign policy he described as “a politics of gangsters, “ with the warning that it could not be trusted that neither Italy nor Germany Keep their promises. 7 But when the Munich Agreement was signed in 1938, Rassinier was one of the many Frenchmen to describe himself as an “inhabitant of Munich.” Repeating the words of the former prime minister . Leon Blum , his support for the agreements was “without much pride, it is true, but without any shame” , since Rassinier regarded the war as the greatest catastrophe, and did not believe that “not even Mussolini after Ethiopia , not even Hitler Which makes the blood run in the company of Spain, would risk such madness . ” 8 Rassinier was condemned for his pacifist stance, but he replied that while it is easy to be a pacifist in a favorable climate, a real commitment to peace is something that is done in all kinds of situations, and expressed disappointment that so few socialists were “On this side of the barricade.” Referring to Fig.

In August 1939, after the Ribbentrop-Mólotov Pact between the Nazis and the Soviets , Rassinier was arrested by French counterintelligence , which suspected that his newspaper received German funding. Thanks to the intervention of Paul Faure and the SFIO, he was released a few days later, and when France was invaded in May 1940 , Rassinier was reported to his military unit, where he and his comrades spent weeks in the barracks waiting for orders They never came. After the defeat of France, returned to the education in Belfort.

The years of war

Although many of the “Socialists of Munich” participated in the collaboration with the German occupation forces defended by Marshal Pétain , head of the French state shortly after the invasion, Rassinier did not do it. In June 1941, with the invasion of the Soviet Union, resistance to the German occupation was activated and Rassinier joined, first to the republican-socialist coalition Volunteers for the Liberté ; and then the resistance group Liberation ( Libération ), organized in northern France by Henri Ribière. Rassinier became director of Libération Nord in the territories of Alsace and Belfort. Like other members of the War Resisters’ International in different countries, Rassinier practiced nonviolent resistance to the occupation, based on his pacifist principles and fear of reprisals against innocent people . Rassinier, using a common expression at the time, did not feel comfortable playing with the skin of others.

Using his contacts in editorial media, he falsified identity documents and helped establish an underground railroad from Belfort to the Swiss city of Basel where smugglers, political refugees and persecuted Jews smuggled into the security zone. In 1986, Resistance member Yves Allain’s testimony revealed that Rassinier had also worked closely with the Burgundy evacuation network, set up by the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) to smuggle allied pilots down through Switzerland. 10 11

Rassinier wrote articles for the sympathizer government newspaper Vichy Le Rouge et le Bleu ( “Red and Blue”) and, later, collaborated with JL Bruch, Pierre Cochery and Albert Tschann to found an underground publication called The IV e République (“The Fourth Republic”) that advocated resistance and tried to lay the foundations of the postwar period, “because all who survive the war can and must rebuild peace together and thus save the country from civil war.” 12The IV e République demanded that Germany be held responsible for the crimes of National Socialism, although the contribution of the Versailles treaty was not overlooked and Germany and Italy were not held responsible for the unilateral start of the war . The BBC ‘s broadcasts of both London and Algiers welcomed the newspaper’s founding and disseminated extracts, although when the first and only issue of the war was published, Rassinier had already been arrested.

The Communist groups of the National Front for the Independence of France were hostile to the non-violent conception of Rassinier’s resistance and were enraged by reading the pamphlets in which Rassinier condemned Soviet communism and equated it with National Socialism . After several warnings, the communists condemned him to death. 13 Rassinier saved his life thanks to a series of raids by the German occupying forces and the French police in response to attacks on Germans at a local pharmacy and cafe. Among those arrested, one with a forged identity card broke into the interrogation and revealed how he had obtained it. 14 Thus, on October 30, 1943, Rassinier was arrested in his classroom. 15 His wife and two-year-old son were also arrested, but released several days later. Rassinier suffered eleven days of interrogation that ended with a broken jaw, a crushed hand and damage to a kidney.

Rassinier was deported to Germany by train, in a trip of three days that finished the 30 of January of 1944 in the concentration camp of Buchenwald . After three weeks in quarantine , he became prisoner number 44364 and was transported to the Dora Annex , where rocket tunnels V1 and V2 were built in terrible working conditions. Hunger, disease, overwork, exhaustion and physical abuse on the part of the Allgemeine-SS and the corrupt mafia of the Häftlingsführung (the lower level of camp administration, by the inmates themselves), Resulted in a catastrophic mortality rate.

In his first book, Le Passage de la ligne or l’Expérience vécue , Rassinier says that several factors contributed to his survival. From April to November 1944, his wife sent him food parcels. His friendship with the leader of his block allowed the shipments to be delivered directly, without being subjected to pillage by the administration of the field. For a time, he gained a comfortable job as Schwung (a position between ordinance and servant) of the SS Oberscharführer who ran the guard dogs of the field, which also earned him the opportunity to observe the SS closely. Also, partly as a result of his interrogation, he was suffering from nephritis and spent no less than two hundred fifty days of his imprisonment in the Revier ( infirmary ).

On April 7, 1945, Rassinier de Dora was evacuated in what became a “train of death”, which traveled endlessly from one bombed point to another on the German railway network, without food, without water and without a coat. After several days, when the train took a bend and in spite of a terrible physical state, it jumped of the train and thanks to the angle, escaped to the shots of the SS. The next day he was rescued by the US military .

Paul Rassinier returned to France in June 1945, and was awarded the Vermilion medal of French recognition and the Rosette of the Resistance. They also rated him as a 95 percent invalid (later revised up to 105 percent). He returned to his teaching post but, because of his physical condition, was retired prematurely in 1950.

Postwar: political activities

In 1945, Rassinier resumed his position as head of the federation of the SFIO in Belfort and as editor of La IV and République . He presented candidacy and in June of 1946 was chosen like substitute of René Naegelen, deputy of Belfort in the National Assembly of France . 16 Naegelen left the post at the end of his term and Rassinier served for two months as a parliamentarian, being defeated in the next election by Pierre Dreyfus-Schmidt , an old rival. His wife Jeanne had a poor opinion of his future in politics, and Rassinier never ran again. He continued with other political activities, such as collaboration with André Breton , Albert Camus , Jean Cocteau , Jean Giono , Lanza del Vasto and Ernest Reynaud in the defense of the rights of conscientious objectors .

1949-1967: The writer

In 1948, Paul Rassinier had been a history professor for more than twenty-two years, and was dismayed to read stories about concentration camps and deportations that he considered to be uncertain. In the same way, he was repelled by the unilateral condemnation of the Third Reich for crimes against humanity which, because of his experience in Morocco, he did not consider unique, and he feared that nationalist hatreds and hatred would divide Europe. As he explained in The Lie of Ulysses :

One day, I realized that public opinion had forged a false idea of ​​the German camps, that the problem of concentration camps remained in spite of everything that had been said, and that the deportees, although they did not enjoy Had no longer made any major contribution to changing the needles of international politics for dangerous routes. The issue was outside the framework of the salons. Suddenly I had the feeling that, with stubbornness, I would become an accomplice of a bad deed. 17

Rassinier’s first book, Passage de la ligne (1948), in which he recounts his personal experience in Buchenwald, obtained an immediate critical and commercial success. One commentator described it as “the first written testimony with calm and cold-bloodedness, against what resentment, stupid hatred and chauvinism demand .” The Union of Journalists and Writers also praised it, and it was a reading recommended by SFIO. 18 It emphasizes in him the critic of the administration of the fields by the prisoners. Rassinier argues that only Russian prisoners practiced effective resistance and that many of the brutalities of the camp were committed not by SS agents but by mostly Communist prisoners who took over the administration ( Häftlingsführung , ” management by the prisoners ” ) And directed the internal affairs of the fields to their own advantage. Rassinier attributes the high mortality rate in the two camps that he saw to the corruption of this management.

His second book, The Lie of Ulysses (1950), caused controversy. Rassinier examines what he considers as accounts of typical fields. He criticizes exaggerations and denounces authors such as Eugen Kogon , who had stated in L’Enfer organisé (1947) that the main purpose of the administration of the prisoners of the Buchenwald camp was “to maintain a nucleus of prisoners against the SS.” Rassinier replies that the prisoners of this nucleus thought only of themselves, adding that the Communists were trying to save their own skin after the war: “taking the witness seat and storming with a lot of shouting, they avoided being accused.” He also describes his visits to Dachau and Mauthausen , observes that in both places he obtained contradictory accounts of how the gas chambers were supposed to function , and expresses for the first time his doubts about the existence of these chambers and a Nazi policy of extermination .

Ulysses’ lie aroused scandal to the point of being attacked on November 2, 1950 in the French National Assembly, 19 but more by the preface of the writer Albert Paraz than by the contents of the book. Rassinier and Paraz were the subject of a denunciation for defamation of several organizations. After a long series of trials and appeals, Rassinier and Paraz were acquitted, and in 1955 an expanded edition of the book was sold and sold well. However, the scandal prompted complaints from members of the SFIO and, on April 9, 1951, Rassinier was expelled from the party “despite the respect that his person imposes,” according to the document of expulsion. An attempt by Marceau Pivert to reintegrate him into the organization was rejected.

Rassinier spent the rest of the 1950s advocating socialism and pacifism. He wrote articles in Défense de l’Homme – a commentary by the pacifist anarchist Louis Lecoin – and in La Voie de la Paix – the pacifist Émile Bauchet – to condemn the war in Indochina and Algeria , as well as the financial policies of the governments of The Fourth French Republic . He also wrote for the libertarian newsletter Contre-Courant and for the anarchist SIA (Solidarité Internationale Antifasciste), as well as for many other publications. In 1953 he published Le Discours de la dernière chance, Essai d’introduction à un doctrine de la paix (“The discourse of the last opportunity, essay of introduction to a doctrine of peace”), where he developed his pacifist ideology; And in 1955 Le Parlement aux mains des banques (“Parliament in the hands of the banks”), a condemnation of capitalism and French financial policy. His 1960 essay, L’Equivoque Révolutionnaire (“The Revolutionary Misunderstanding”), was his only theoretical writing, a metaphysical and dialectical examination of revolutionary thought with a second part devoted to a socialist analysis of the Hungarian revolution of 1956 . Several publications edited by episodes and a version of relative success saw the light in 1961.

In 1961, Rassinier returned to his previous themes with Ulysse trahi par les siens (“Ulysses betrayed by his own”), an anthology of speeches pronounced in twelve cities of Germany after the third edition of The lie of Ulysses . The trip had been sponsored by Karl-Heinz Priester , a former SS officer and propagandist under the direction of Joseph Goebbels (and once used by US intelligence). 20 Priester was one of the founders of the German right-wing party Deutsche Reichspartie (1950-1965), which, coupled with his growing association with right-wing militants such as Maurice Bardèche, led him to be denounced as anti-Semitic by people like Olga Wormser-Migot, Who stated that Rassinier “belongs to the spiritual family of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, ” a writer often criticized as anti-Semitic. twenty-one

In 1962, after the trial of Adolf Eichmann Eichmann in Jerusalem , Rassinier published Le véritable procès Eichmann ou les vainqueurs incorrigibles (“The authentic Eichmann process, or the incorrigible victors”), a condemnation of the Nuremberg and Eichmann trials , as well As in an enlarged edition of the Second Auschwitz trial of 1965, in which Rassinier himself had been rejected by the German federal authorities. 22 At the end of the extended edition, Rassinier argued that the continuation of the war crimes trials were part of a strategy Zionist and Communist to divide and demoralize Europe. Rassinier was therefore denounced in the press, for example when journalist Bernard Lecache described him as “agent of the Nazi International”. 2. 3

It was in 1964, with Le Drame des juifs européens (“The Drama of the European Jews”), that Rassinier concluded that there had never been a policy of extermination in the Third Reich. Rassinier criticized Raul Hilberg ‘s reference work , The Destruction of the European Jews (1961), questioning the reliability of the testimonies and the technical viability of the alleged methods of extermination. His criticism of Doctor at Auschwitz , of Myklos Nyiszli, would be partially confirmed twenty – five years later by the forensic historian Jean-Claude Pressac 24 He cited the work of Zionist – inspired L’État d’Israël (1930), French writer Kadmi Cohen , for To affirm again that Zionist and Jewish organizations conspired to use Nazi crimes as a means of extorting money to finance themselves and the state of Israel. The second part of the book contained a statistical study as a response to those of Léon Poliakov and Hilberg. Rassinier sought to overcome them by his use as a starting point The Jews in the Modern World (1934), by the German Zionist Arthur Ruppin . The French historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet , a frequent critic of Rassinier who had exchanged correspondence with him, criticized this aspceto in 1980 in Un Eichmann de papier et autres textes sur le révisionnisme (“A paper Eichmann and other texts on revisionism”), .

Le Drame des juifs européens aroused little interest until years after Rassinier’s death, when in 1977 Georges Wellers, editor of the magazine Le Monde Juif , dissected the book in a first attempt to refute methodically Rassinier’s writings. 25 Wellers compiles Rassinier’s mistakes, omissions and erroneous quotations, some of them substantial. For example, Rassinier claims that the first accusation of the use of gas chambers by Nazi Germany appeared in Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (1944), by Polish Jew lawyer Raphael Lemkin . Wellers points out that Lemkin’s book does not mention gas chambers just once. At one point in his essay, Wellers condemned Rassinier’s arguments as “a model of hypocrisy and the scandalous falsity typical of all the procedures routinely employed by Rassinier.”

Also in 1964, it was revealed in the course of a defamation suit filed by the French Communist Marie-Claude Vaillant Couturier , that Rassinier had written articles in the right-wing magazine Rivarol under the pseudonym Jean-Paul Bermont , which caused him to lose many of His anarchist contacts. 26

In 1965, Rassinier published his latest book of success. The play of Rolf Hochhuth The vicar (1963) had been represented in different languages ​​and in many countries. Rassinier, an avowed atheist , was however indignant at Hochhuth’s thesis that Pope Pius XII had kept silent while exterminating the Jews of Europe, and interpreted the work as a mere incitement to division in Europe, to sectarian hatred Anticaphobia and xenophobia . Rassinier traveled to Rome and gained access to the Vatican Secret Archives . The resulting work, L’opération Vicaire (1965), was a defense of Pius XII that challenged the motivations of the pope’s Protestant and socialist critics . Rassinier showed that Catholic opposition to Hitler was favored by a comparison with Protestant support for the German leader, and drew attention to Pius XI’s condemnation of pre-war National Socialism (eg in the Encyclical Mit brennender Sorge ) And to his efforts for peace, all of which drew Rassinier’s praises to the Vatican . 27

Rassinier continued writing between 1965 and 1967, and his last series of articles, titled Une Troisième Guerre mondiale pour du pétrôle? (“A Third World War for Oil?”), Was published in La Défense de l’Occident between July and August 1967. His latest book was Les Responsables de la seconde guerre mondiale (“Those responsible for World War II” ).

Rassinier, father of Holocaust denialism

During the early 1960s, Rassinier maintained an epistolary relationship with the American historian Harry Elmer Barnes , pioneer of historical revisionism as well as Holocaust denialism , who managed the English translation of four of Rassinier’s books, Rassinier acceded to the English-speaking public. 28

In addition to Barnes, whose critical writings on the origins of World War I had aroused the admiration of Rassinier, another of his great influences was Jean Norton Cru and his titanic study of 1929 Témoins, Essai d’analyze et de critique des souvenirs de combattants Edits en français from 1915 to 1928 (‘Tests, analysis and analysis of memories of combatants published in French from 1915 to 1928’). In The Lie of Ulysses , Rassinier reports that it was Cru’s book that provided him with the tools he needed to evaluate the testimony of witnesses.

The writings of Rassinier had great repercussion after his death. In Why Did The Heavens Not Darken? (1988), the historian of Princeton University Arno Mayer , even without questioning the existence of the gas chambers or the Nazi extermination policy, warns that “the sources for the study of the gas chambers are both Scarce and unreliable “. In his view, “the numerous contradictions, ambiguities and errors of existing sources can not be denied” and “most of what is known is based on statements by Nazi officials and executioners in post-war trials, and in memories Survivors and spectators. These testimonies must be filtered with care, for they may influence subjective factors of great complexity. ” 29 Mayer’s book contains no quotations, but names Paul Rassinier and The Lie of Ulysses among his main bibliography.

As Jean Plantin warns in the introduction to his biography of Rassinier, “his historiographical approach is inseparable from his pacifist convictions, as his books and abundant articles prove.” Rassinier often reiterated the socialist belief that “the working class has no country.” In his view, the unilateral condemnation of fascist nations for crimes against humanity , as well as the colonial wars of the 1950s and 1960s, were part of a continuing effort to divide the working class of various nations behind the walls of Xenophobia, nationalism and hostility.

In his first conclusion, Plantin considers that the inadequacies of Rassinier’s work are attributable to “working with reprehensible methods and, to be honest, methods that are not sufficiently broad or universal”, in addition to pointing out that he studied a relatively small number of documents and testimonies . Still, Plantin states that “Rassinier can properly be regarded as” the father of Holocaust revisionism, “which he supports by pointing to his innovations in” refutation of testimonies of deportees and skepticism in perspective on the confessions of the ancient Nazis , A critical judgment with the sources and contrary to the authenticity and credibility of some documents; The outline of a physical, chemical, and technical refutation of crematoriums and gas chambers, etc. Plantin quotes with generosity descriptions both of his own and of strangers who attribute this title to Rassinier.

Last years

The lifelong dream of Paul Rassinier was to write the history of Florence during the time of Machiavelli , but did not live to do it . He never recovered from the damage he sustained in the tortures of the SD and during the fifteen months in the fields of Buchenwald and Dora. During the last 22 years of his life he suffered from such high blood pressure that he could not stand up without risk. He died on July 28, 1967, in Asnières-sur-Seine while working on two books, The History of the State of Israel and a new version of A Third World War for Oil .

Secondary sources

Jean Plantin Paul Rassinier: Socialist, Pacifist and Revisionist ; Also the source of several articles written by Rassinier in diverse publications, as it cites Plantin.

Jean Maitron The Biographical Dictionary of the French Labor Movement

History of the Combat Units of the Resistance (1940-44) by the Army Historical Service

External links

References

Back to top↑ Joseph Rassinier’s biography from Jean Maitron’s “Dictionnaire biographique du mouvement ouvrier Français” (The Biographical Dictionary of the French Labor Movement).

Back to top↑ “Mort de M. Paul Rassinier”, Le Monde , July 30-31, 1967; Also referenced in the entry of Paul Rassinier in Maitron’s “Dictionnaire biographique du mouvement ouvrier Français” ; Also referenced in Pierre Vidal-Naquet’s A paper Eichmann- Anatomy of a Lie.

Back to top^ Droite De Vivre , January 1, 1964, collected by Plantin in Annexes.

Back to top↑ Auschwitz: Technique And Operation Of The Gas Chambers , The Beate Klarsfeld Foundation (1989), pp. 473-479.

Back to top↑ Reply to the Neo-Nazi Historical Falsification of Facts Concerning the Holocaust , Wellers article included in The Holocaust and the Neo-Nazi Mythomania , English edition published by Beate Klarsfeld The Foundation, 1978.

Back to top↑ Plantin, Part II, Chapter 1.

Back to top↑ Open Letter to Paul Rassinier of Monsignor George Roche, Superior General of Opus Cenaculi, dated October 24, 1965; Published in Lectures Francaises No. 105, December 1965, partially reproduced by Plantin, Part II, Chapter 2.

Back to top↑ A review of three of Rassinier’s books was published by Ernest Zaugg in the American magazine The Nation , No. 195, July 14, 1962, under the title “The Nazi Whitewash.”

Back to top↑ Why Did The Heavens Not Darken? The “Final Solution” in History , Arno J. Mayer, New York: Pantheon Publishers (1988) quoted by Plantin in Conclusion 1, footnote 315.